yusing's Journal: Quote#2, McKenna: Cosmic Giggle

Quote#2 - from: terence mckenna: mind contagions by Alex Burns ([e-mail]) - September 08, 2001

McKenna also feels close to the SF writer and cyber-shaman Philip K. Dick, drawing analogies between his encounter with an 'insect-like intelligence' during an anthropological safari to the Amazon Basin in 1971, and Dick's startling encounter with a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) three years later.

Both were according to McKenna, "encounters with the Overmind, which is the humanly knowable portion of the intelligent Other. Jacques Vallee called the category of experience that Dick and I had 'the Cosmic Giggle,' which is a randomly roving zone of synchronicity and statistical anomaly.

"Should you be caught up in it, it will turn reality on its head. It is objective and subjective, simultaneously 'really there' and yet somehow is sustained by imagination and expectation; the umbilicus of our ontology, the place where we see that the world came from something very different from what it now appears to be."